Brazil vs Peru

Brazil is 6.6 times larger than Peru — 8,515,770 against 1,285,216 km². Brazil is 6.2 times more populous than Peru — 212,812,405 against 34,576,665 people.

Side by side

Population density

Peru is slightly more densely populated, by 7.7% — 27 against 25 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• Different currencies: the Brazilian real and the Peruvian sol.
• Brazil spans 4 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.

Brazil

The fifth-largest country in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It holds about sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest, and the Amazon River discharges roughly a fifth of all the fresh water that reaches the world's oceans — more than the next seven rivers combined. Brazil borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.

Peru

Peru holds the source of the Amazon and about sixty percent of its territory is Amazon basin, but most people live on the dry Pacific coast. Cotahuasi and Colca are among the deepest canyons in the world, both over 3,000 m. The Nazca lines, drawn on the coastal desert between about 500 BC and AD 500, cover some 450 km² and are only legible from the air or the surrounding hills.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.